Dying Flames

by Robert Barnard

  “Only it never got to him, did it?”

  “No.” Oliver shifted in his seat. “That was the first inkling I had that Peggy was slippery about money, with no conscience about how she got hold of it. Before I’d just lent her the odd few pounds that never came back, but this was something else. As soon as I learnt what had happened—from Dad, who was absolutely bowled over, and really bitter and sad—I cut off ties entirely. Quite apart from anything else, I knew I had been made a fool of, and it would have done me no good for that to get around at work. I never felt the smallest urge to make any advances, try for a reconciliation with her. So there’s been no contact between me and the children.”

  “But it’s brought you closer to your father.”

  “To Dad and to Mum. You never met her, I gather. She was a wonderful woman. Dad had been in the garage trade, and he knew about dodgy dealings, even if he never went in for them himself. Mum was straight as they come, and warm and amusing too.”

  “But they both had made a favorite of Peggy as a girl?”

  Oliver almost flinched.

  “Yes…. You can’t blame them—she was so sparkling, had such life…. I could understand her being Daddy’s girl: that was a thing one saw so often and felt was only natural. But Mum was just as besotted. I was only a year or so older, and though I loved Peggy too and thought she had wonderful talents, I could see through her on the human level, and I knew she twisted them round her little finger. That was something they eventually found out when they only got half the money for the house…. It was good to see a lot of Mum in her last years, and it’s been good to see close up what a fine, decent man Dad is, what strength he has shown through it all.”

  “Here he is.”

  He didn’t look strong now. He skirted the little knots of drinkers, his eyes going everywhere, his stoop still more pronounced. He nodded to Graham and sat down, saying nothing. He seemed to be oppressed by a great burden of misery and memories. To leave him and his son together, Graham got up and fetched him a drink from the bar. He didn’t have to ask him what he wanted. Ted was a beer man. Only when he had downed a quarter of the glass did some kind of life appear in his eyes.

  “God, I needed that,” he said. “I haven’t needed one so much since Mary died.”

  “What did they want to know, Dad?” Oliver asked.

  Ted seemed to struggle to find a memory of the last half hour. “Oh, the party at Luigi’s. Why she left, and what she was going to do. What we did afterwards…. I’d been over it all before, when I reported her missing at Romford.”

  “I’ve been over it too,” said Graham.

  “Well, that’s police work. They have to do it, apparently—go over and over the same things…. But these people also wanted to talk about her ties with round here.”

  The two younger men thought about that.

  “You mean with Essex? With the Colchester area?” asked Graham.

  “Yes. I really had to puzzle my brain. Of course she was brought up not so far from here, and I told them about that. But had she had any connection with the area since she moved with us to Romford?” Ted looked at his son, who shook his head.

  “Not that I know of, but then I wouldn’t know, not about recent years. There’s been no communication. I don’t know of any connection in the years after we moved, but I only lived at home now and then, as you know, Dad.”

  “I’m a contact,” said Graham. “I’m a sort of relic of her years living in Bidford.”

  “But you only came back into her life a few weeks ago,” said Ted.

  “Long enough, if you’re scraping around for suspects.”

  “Do you keep up contacts with Colchester as a rule?” asked Oliver.

  “No. My parents are both dead. I have no links. I came back about seven or eight weeks ago to go to a school reunion. It was in the local paper, and it was that that brought Christa to pay me a visit. It was a birthday party for the man who directed Peggy in St. Joan.”

  “George Long. I remember him,” said Ted. “He’s still alive, is he?”

  “Yes, very much so. But he’s eighty-two, so I don’t think they’ll be looking at him as a suspect.”

  “I wasn’t meaning—”

  “There was one of the old boys there—he was in St. Joan as well, and so was I—who got both sentimental and aggressive at the thought of Peggy. But I never got the impression that he’d had anything to do with her since that time.”

  Neither Ted nor Oliver felt this was a very fruitful source of speculation.

  “I was back here a few days ago,” said Graham, the thought suddenly coming to him. “To see Adam’s grandmother in Stanway.”

  Ted nodded. “Peggy used to get on well with her. She and Harry used to visit her quite often.”

  “So she could have made local contacts then,” said Graham. “Was Harry from round the Colchester area?”

  Ted shook his head. “I don’t rightly remember, but I think his mother moved to Stanway from Romford, as a lot of people do move to this area when they retire or are widowed: it’s a bit cheaper, and a lot quieter. Anyway, Peggy and Harry met in Romford, I do remember that. She was in a pub with the acting crowd after a rehearsal. Harry wasn’t one of that mob, not then or after, though he did a few odd jobs for them now and then because he was always handy.”

  “So what happened? Did they just get talking?”

  “Either he picked her up, or she picked him up,” said Ted, back in his scales-fallen-from-eyes mode.

  “Graham, did Harry come with you and Adam to see his mother?” asked Oliver.

  “Not a chance. He’s under orders from his wife to see as little of Adam as possible. She has him completely under her thumb, apparently. He was paying a secret, snatched visit to Adam earlier today, but when he heard me talking on the phone to the police about the body at Brightlingsea, he took off like a rocket.”

  The father and son looked at each other, but said nothing.

  “Isn’t it sad?” said Oliver eventually. “Dad and Mum were ideal parents, nothing too much trouble, always there when they were needed. And all they produce is a boring insurance man and a fantasist whose only interest was in herself. And yet she and Harry—he may just be weak, but Peggy!—apparently produce or at least bring up strong kids, full of character and basically decent and honest, if Dad is to be believed. If you’d looked at her, you’d have said there was no way she should have had those two.”

  “Three,” said Graham. Ted and Oliver looked abashed.

  “Of course, three,” said Oliver. “But Peggy couldn’t get either credit or blame for—what’s his name?”

  “Terry Telford,” said Graham. “No, I suppose she couldn’t. I just mentioned him to emphasize that he does exist, was around on the night, and yet we seem to have forgotten him. I don’t suppose the police have.”

  “I mentioned him to the police today,” said Ted. “And before, at Romford. I expect they’ll get on to him now, but I can’t say they showed any special interest. Maybe they think he hasn’t been around Peggy long enough to work up any sort of…resentment, rage, whatever it is that can make a man murder.”

  Oliver shifted uneasily in his seat, as one who had known Peggy long enough to leave a rich supply of those emotions.

  “The meeting between him and Peggy was presumably only the culmination of something, of a search,” said Graham. “And the search itself may have been fueled by rage or resentment.”

  “Odd about the two fathers,” said Ted.

  He was voicing the feelings of all of them, but, strangely, it was something that Graham, in his concern for the well-being and futures of Christa and Adam, had spent little time musing on.

  “I only heard about that from Dad on the phone,” said Oliver. “Let me get it straight in my mind. According to Peggy, you were the father of Terry Telford.”

  “Yes,” agreed Graham. “When I had the only talk with her alone that I’ve had since schooldays, she said, ‘It was a boy, you know. A baby boy.�
� I could have guessed it was a baby. And then Terry appeared out of the Internet into her life: he was the right age and it was clear—it seemed clear to me—that I was his father.”

  “Though there’s the complication, isn’t there, that Christa also thought you were her father?” asked Oliver.

  “I don’t think that’s much of a complication. First of all, I was away in Mali in ’83 to ’84, when she must have been conceived. Between Terry’s birth and Christa’s I’d made a very tentative start as a novelist. By the late eighties, when Peggy might begin to talk to Christa about her parentage, I was getting nominated for fiction prizes and mentioned in lists of promising young writers. Having given away for adoption a possible status symbol and talking point, Peggy just transferred the paternity to the younger child. I think that’s very much in line with her usual approach to the truth.”

  “She came up with much more fantastic stories than that in her time,” agreed Ted. “But have you thought: if having you as the father of one of her children is a status symbol, she could have made up your fathering of Terry too. You and she had…been together, but that in itself isn’t much of a story, and it only gets really interesting and believable if there was a child as the result.”

  The younger men both pondered this.

  “What did she say at the time?” Graham asked. Ted leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

  “She said it could have been a lot of people. Well, ‘several’ was how she put it. Her mother and I couldn’t believe our ears. Our darling girl! It was the shame of thinking that some of her men could be local that decided us: we had to move. And Romford seemed the ideal place: big and sort of anonymous, a London suburb. A child of uncertain father wouldn’t make the sort of stink there that it would in Bidford.”

  “But she didn’t mention my name?” Graham asked.

  “No. She mentioned boys in the school play, local men, but she never put a name to them. Said it wouldn’t be right. Maybe she couldn’t.”

  “So along comes Terry, and he’s handed over for adoption to the Telfords. Were they told anything about the father?”

  “Search me. She did all that herself. I think she went through the regular channels though. She had phone calls at home from the Social Services people—whatever they were called then. Or said that’s who they were from.”

  All three men sat thinking, all of them out of their depths. Even Ted, it seemed, had tried to have as little as possible to do with Peggy’s first pregnancy and birth. Graham turned to Oliver.

  “You never asked Peggy about the father of her son?”

  “Not on your life! I was twenty, very inexperienced, and thoroughly ashamed of my sister. Also by then I knew I couldn’t rely on getting a truthful answer out of her, so what was the point of asking?”

  Silence descended again.

  “Let’s shift the focus away from Peggy,” said Graham at last. “Young Mr. Telford says he knows who his natural father is. How does he know? Maybe by going on the Internet. That’s how he got in touch with Peggy. Why try to find your father first? Most people are more interested in their mother. The mother has had more to do with the child, inside and outside of the womb. Often there’s a pathetic story involved. With the father it’s more likely to be a rather grubby tale of cowardice or dereliction of duty. But Terry goes after the father first—or so far as we can tell he does. He’d only known his mother for three weeks or so before she vanished out of his life.”

  “There’s another thing,” said Oliver. “You’ve a much better chance of finding your mother. A father may not even know he is the father of such a child—as you didn’t, Graham—or he may not want to be identified for financial or other reasons. Many people would say there isn’t quite the same bond as between a mother and her child, so a strong wish to form a close relationship is rarer.”

  “All this leaves us with a mystery,” said Graham. “Why, how, and when did Terry come to find his father—if that’s what he is—before he found his mother?”

  “Ask the lad himself,” said Ted. “There’s no reason for him to be embarrassed or ashamed. Why should he clam up?”

  “Why indeed?” said Graham. “But that just could be connected to Peggy’s death, so we ought to go carefully.”

  “We?” said Oliver. “Is there a we? If so, I don’t think I’m part of it. We should just leave it to the police.”

  “Aren’t you curious who murdered your sister?”

  Oliver thought, then shook his head.

  “Hardly at all, to be honest. When you haven’t had any contact for years, and when you’ve been done down by her…Well, it’s difficult to care.”

  “I think this is a plot to you,” said Ted, to Graham’s surprise. “Not a story of real people, but a story, like you might use in a book. I didn’t get the impression you cared much about Terry Telford.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He’s just one of the pieces in the jigsaw to you.”

  “Maybe. But I care about Christa and Adam.”

  “But what will happen to them?” Oliver asked. “How can you claim to be their guardian or foster father? You’ve no connection with them.”

  “You talk as if people are queuing up,” said Graham. “I think that if I’m in situ, if Adam is happy, and if Christa is with us at least part of the time—there’s no question of her legally needing a foster home, but she’d be a stabilizing factor for Adam—I think the Social Services people will be ready to rubber-stamp the arrangement.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Oliver feelingly.

  “And I’m grateful and will be quite willing to play a part,” said Ted.

  “Look, I care for both of them. And I also care about the truth coming out—in an abstract way, I think: that people are better for facing up to truth. So I may follow up trails that I think the police won’t be interested in. By the way, Ted, there’s no doubt that it is murder, is there?”

  “No. Strangulation,” said Ted, getting up. “No disrespect, Graham, but Peggy, even after what she’s done, could never be a piece in a jigsaw to me. Not after I’ve seen her on the slab, seen the marks on her throat…. I think I need to go home and have a rest, Oliver. I’m absolutely dead beat.”

  Oliver jumped up, very ready to depart. They clearly wanted to be on their own. On their own together, or actually on their own? Graham wondered. He raised his hand in farewell, gave them five minutes, then left the Crown to find his way back to his car.

  His brain was less tired than his body, and as he walked, he reviewed the evening. Ted, he felt sure, had only had half his mind on the conversation. The rest of his mental faculties had been back in the 1970s, reviewing the death of a daughter he had once had, or thought he had, rather than that of the middle-aged woman who had given him so much grief. Oliver was more difficult to fathom. Like his namesake he seemed to want more: more love, which he had had too little of in childhood, more respect, more of life’s rewards. Had he cast aside his sister too readily, Graham wondered, and had the motive been jealousy more than the feeling of having been swindled by her?

  When he got home, Adam was just back from an evening with his friends, seemingly restored to normality by the elasticity of youth. This time Graham did not just accept this gratefully and hope for the best. Telling him about his mother’s death enabled him to make a point again with force and sincerity.

  “As long as you need it or want it, you have a home here,” he said.

  Adam nodded, apparently sincerely grateful, and Graham was glad he had done something that was dictated by no self-interest or ordinary logic. He didn’t ask himself whether his offer to Adam was really a covert offer to Christa.

  As he went to bed, a stiff whiskey later, his mind was on someone else: the young man who was apparently his real son. One thing he was going to have to find out was how Terry had acquired a father who was not him. And that, surely, meant he was going to have to revise his decision about talking to the Telfords.

  Chapter 14<
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  Parenting

  Graham had a great deal to think about in the days that followed. Adam was not a problem: he had accepted his mother’s death coolly, as Christa had too, and he resumed his nonchalant approach to whatever befell him, though this did not deceive Graham, and he was conscious all the time of the need to provide a bedrock of stability for the boy. But he was also thinking of his other near-son, and the need to get into some contact with him. Much thought produced the conviction that he should not approach Terry before he had a better idea of what the Telfords were like, and what kind of upbringing he had had. And approaching the Telfords presented problems, because they could have been warned off him by their daughter.

  He brought up that difficulty when Christa phoned to tell him she wouldn’t be coming home that weekend. She actually used the word home, which softened the disappointment. But the wonderful lift of the heart when he heard her voice did not last for long.

  “There’s a special Egypt of Rameses II exhibition at the British Museum that all the Egyptian History students are going along to on Saturday,” she said. “And I’m going to spend quality time with my boyfriend.”

  The word, as always, sent a dagger to Graham’s heart.

  “Oh? And which boyfriend is this?”

  “Sean. Haven’t I told you about him? He’s quite nice.”

  “Are you going to bring Sean to meet me?”

  “You’re joking, I take it. This is not the nineteenth century. I never took any of my boyfriends home to meet Mum, and I’m not going to start now. He’s just a boyfriend. It’s not a long-term thing. I am only nineteen, remember.”

  “I’ll remember. And that I’m not your parent. Talking of which—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m trying to think of the best way to approach Terry Telford’s parents.”

  “Really?” There was a feeling of ears being pricked up.

  “Yes. I don’t think I should approach the man himself without having some idea of his background. Was it really a happy childhood? Was he idolized as his sister said? If so, why does he apparently feel so passionately about the man he believes is his natural father? I need to get a lot of background filled in.”